The Greater Journey

Americans in Paris

McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.

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Probing research whose results are related in detail-rich anecdotes without much in the way of preconceived prejudice (except that the Paris Commune was a Very Bad Thing!).

While set in Paris, the city is evoked only in relation to the experience of Americans in the 19th century. The subject, that is, is Americans in Paris from circa 1820 to circa 1900, and nothing else. The author refrains altogether from talking about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which gives reading the volume a pleasantly escapist feeling.

McCullough's pedestrian style doesn't rival the prose of many of his subjects, but the book is so rich in lengthy quotations that an impatient reader never has long to wait for a change of voice. (This unpretentious style is no doubt one of the reasons for McCullough's popular success.)

I've been listening to the book on CD and decided I needed to get the hard copy to follow up on all the characters he talks about. I am fascinated to hear history from the point of view of individuals and interested in how he researched and developed all the stories.

Terry1865
Aug 15, 2013

This book was just recommended to me. It is marvelous! McCullough covers medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes, Minister to France Elihu Washburne and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in special detail. Many other famous persons from history are intertwined throughout the book.I very much enjoyed following the stories of these adventurous characters to the end of their lives,

While I learned a lot about the city of Paris and the Americans who have visited it between the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, McCullough’s approach is staid, elitist and old school. Horatio Alger is an unmentioned presence, and he clearly admires ambition, success, fame and power. The Greater Journey is a history of “winners”—a kind I rarely read anymore. The book’s premise is interesting, but the results are disappointing. I’m neither as sympathetic to any of the reigning monarchs as this writer evidently is nor as dismissive of the radical forces that struggled to overthrow them. Many voices are left out, and there’s much more to the narratives that are included than this author is willing to relate (or, in all likelihood, capable of seeing).

LisaRiegel
Feb 14, 2012

As always, McCullough bring history to life through his detailed, skillful and beautifully paced storytelling.

gracindaisy
Jan 14, 2012

In the 1800’s Paris was the cultural capital of the world – a mecca for artists, writers, and doctors. Many famous and not so famous Americans - Elizabeth Blackwell, James Fenimore Cooper, George Healy, Samuel Morse, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and many others.

What a wonderful trip back in time! This delightful book not only took me on a trip to Paris in the 19th century, but it provided vivid pictures and well explained descriptions of Art History, medical advancement, social structure, and American History via a detour thru Europe. David McCullough writes books that educate as well as entertain.

"With “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris,” McCullough explores the intellectual legacy that France settled on its 19th-century visitors. The result is an epic of ideas, as well as an exhilarating book of spells."
Stacy Schiff
NYT May 27 2011